Le degré d'expertise a-t-il une influence sur la perception olfactive? Quelques éléments de réponse dans le domaine du vin

We compare the olfactive dimensions used by expert and novice wine tasters to describe and categorise a series of 13 red burgundy wines. Verbal and nonverbal approaches have been used in parallel. The verbal approach included a communication task and a description task. Pairs of assessors were asked to match a series of samples based only on verbal exchanges. All the generated terms were recorded and the most frequently used terms served as a basis for the description task. The non-verbal approach included a similarity judgement task. Multivariate analyses have been used to analyse the data. Results show that (1) both groups of subjects were able to perform the communication task reasonably well and to generate a coherent set of descriptors, (2) the two groups of subjects used an equivalent number of dimensions to describe and categorise the wines, and (3) the two groups of subjects used the same dimensions for the non-verbal task, but different dimensions for the verbal task. This dissociation between verbal and non-verbal task suggests that the perceptual representation of wine is similar for the two groups of subjects but that the verbalisation of this representation varies with expertise level. Subjects with a higher level of expertise tend to use analytical terms whereas subjects with a lower level tend to use holistic terms.